The history of the Steiner optics brand started during a post-war period in 1947 with Karl Steiner’s one-man workshop in Germany. The founder’s dream was to create high-quality functional optical products that would be the best in the world.

For several decades Steiner has been an optics manufacturer most famous for its excellent military-specification binoculars. The production of Steiner telescopes began in 2010 with a line of military telescopes. These telescopes were of exceptional quality but were also very expensive. Fortunately a hunting line of telescopes that were priced more affordably was put into mass production from 2012 onwards.

Steiner’s Ranger series is pitched at the hunting market, and aims to provide a top-grade telescope (on par or better than the other famous German optics brands) at a competitive price. All Steiner optics are produced entirely in-house, so Steiner has total control of its production process, which has 460 steps just to perfect each lens.

The Ranger telescope features proprietary multi-coated lenses that offer good high-contrast images, which are equally vivid in low light. The light transmission is more than 90 per cent yet packaged into a short scope, which has a wide maximum field of view for better target acquisition and to maintain a good, safe 9cm eye relief. The Ranger offers a parallax adjustment from 50 m to infinity.

The illuminated red dot reticle is precise and clear with six night-time/low-light settings and five daytime settings and an off position between every two settings.

“The Steiner Ranger has proved to be immensely popular, and we have sold several of these telescopes over the past two years”, says Habitat Africa’s André Strydom.

“A strong selling point is the fact that this telescope offers absolutely superb performance that is in the same class or better than some of the better-known German brands. The construction is very sturdy, virtually military spec, and the 30mm tube is an improvement on some other competitors in the same price bracket. The warranty is obviously a great benefit, but I’m happy to say that we’ve never had issues with any of the scopes we’ve sold.”